There are easier places to explain medicine than a corridor full of football players, radio hosts, agents, handlers, microphones and free promotional hats. Yet this is precisely where Russo Partners decided a healthcare story belonged. During the NFL playoffs and the week of the Super Bowl, when sports media reaches its annual boil, the New York communications firm began putting athlete storytellers and physicians in front of national and local shows. The subject was not a shoe, a sportsbook or a protein drink. It was an underrecognized medical condition, its treatment options and the route to a qualified specialist.
The choice tells you nearly everything useful about Russo Partners. The firm does public relations, investor relations, social media and corporate communications. Those are the nouns on the capabilities page. The more revealing business is matching an intricate scientific claim to a human messenger, then finding the brief moment when an audience will actually listen.
The audience was already in the room
Traditional outreach was unlikely to break through. That was the first problem. Health information competes against anxiety, jargon and the natural human preference to think about something else. Football does not suffer from an attention shortage. Russo Partners' move was to borrow the sport's distribution without pretending the medical story was entertainment.
Beginning in 2021, the agency ran January and February campaigns across sports talk outlets including SiriusXM, ESPN Las Vegas and CBS Sports Radio. Athletes supplied lived experience and recognition. Medical experts supplied the boundary lines. Each appearance pointed to a trackable condition-specific website, often with a doctor-finder tool. The handoff mattered: attention was only valuable if a listener could do something with it.
By 2025, five campaign cycles had generated more than 150 placements. In 2024, direct traffic to the destination site rose 80.5 percent from the comparable period a year earlier. Use of the physician finder increased, especially in cities with strong radio coverage. The clever part was not merely placing a famous person near a diagnosis. It was building a small conversion system behind the conversation.
The firm is built like a translation desk
Tony Russo co-founded Noonan/Russo with Susan Noonan in 1988, when an agency devoted exclusively to healthcare was itself a pointed bet. The company became Russo Partners in 2007 and chose to remain a boutique. Public records and the firm's LinkedIn page put it in the 11-to-50 employee band; supplied company data counts 24. It works from New York with clients worldwide.
The staff composition is the strategy. Russo Partners says its team holds more than 20 advanced degrees and includes Ph.D. scientists, physicians, former television and radio journalists, Wall Street veterans, digital strategists and social specialists. The mixture answers a persistent problem in life sciences: a statement can be scientifically correct yet commercially useless, or exciting enough for a headline yet too careless for a regulator. Someone in the room must notice both failures.
That is also why the firm straddles public and investor relations. A biotech company may need patients to understand a trial, reporters to understand the data, and investors to understand what the next regulatory milestone changes. Russo Partners offers media relations, corporate positioning, analyst engagement, investor targeting, shareholder communications, crisis work, digital content and thought leadership as parts of the same narrative system.
“Healthcare innovation deserves more than a press release.”Russo Partners
When the calendar broke
One anonymized case study captures what clients are buying better than an org chart. A nonprofit medical association expected a consequential FDA decision and wanted its expert view published at the precise moment the news arrived. Russo Partners monitored the scientific and regulatory calendar, developed the argument and aimed for an opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal.
Then the FDA did something unexpected. The prepared message no longer fit the event. The team rewrote the statement overnight and pushed the new framing into the first wave of coverage. The client's perspective appeared in the Journal, spread through national and trade outlets, and the organization later saw $2 million in new donations following the exposure.
This is the agency's actual product: not a fixed piece of copy, but informed readiness. The original plan failed first because reality moved. What changed the team's mind was evidence - the regulator's decision - and the response was not to defend sunk work. It was to change the message before the news cycle hardened around somebody else's interpretation.
What clients pay for
Russo Partners is privately held and does not post a rate card. The model is the familiar agency mix of tailored projects and ongoing counsel, sold to biopharma, medtech, diagnostics, digital-health, healthcare-IT and healthcare-services organizations. A startup might need a financing narrative. A public company might need quarterly investor communications. A nonprofit might need authority during a regulatory decision. A therapy developer might need trial awareness without crossing into product promotion.
The firm's scale is an advantage when the problem requires senior attention and a disadvantage when the assignment calls for a vast global consumer network. Its scientific specialization reduces translation loss. Its sports-health network offers an unusual route to patients. Its investor work joins the story told to the public with the one told to capital markets. Large integrated rivals can buy more media, staff more countries and spread creative production across hundreds of people. Russo Partners is wagering that in a clinical or regulatory moment, a smaller number of people who understand the molecule is more useful.
The part worth copying
The reusable lesson is not “hire an athlete.” Celebrity without fit is rented noise. The lesson is to design backward from the action. Pick a cultural moment when the audience is already assembled. Choose a messenger with a credible relationship to the problem. Pair emotion with an expert who can keep the claim inside the evidence. Then provide one measurable next step.
A second campaign shows the same architecture at corporate scale. For a biotechnology client introducing a preventive therapy after a regulatory milestone, Russo Partners spent six weeks sequencing embargoed reporter briefings, a pre-market release, executive interviews, written materials, audio and broadcast footage. The reported result was 66 online placements with 532 million potential impressions, 1,750 radio airings on 593 stations, and 459 television and radio mentions across 45 states. The large number is less instructive than the choreography: the assets existed before launch day, in the formats newsrooms could use.
Copy this
Build the route from attention to action before pitching. Prepare multiple media formats. Give technical and human credibility separate seats at the table. Write the contingency message while the main plan is still intact.
Check the fit
The approach weakens when the messenger has no genuine tie to the condition, the science is too early to support the claim, the audience has no useful next action, or the brief demands guaranteed coverage.
There is no magic in Radio Row. There is a context, a trusted voice, a disciplined medical explanation and a URL someone can remember. Remove any one of those and the stunt becomes a stunt. Keep them together and a noisy football week can briefly become a public-health channel.